scan for author and take action

scan for author and take action

[reader]

This question is about News not mail.

I want to scan a group for certain author and take action on messages
found. 

We have all kinds of ways to direct scoring like above but I want to
use those mechanisms to scan and take actions automatically.

Maybe thru Group Params or whatever but I have no idea how to even start
with the necessary lisp code to do this.

I wondered if it isn't already done, either in gnus as it is or addon
packages.

Even better might be to use the split methods against News as well as
mail but in the case of news just send a copy to the destination and
newsgroups would not be affected.   Somehow get in the middle of the
NNTP stream and split as desired.

Is this likely to be overwhelmingly complicated for a heavily lisp
impared but long term gnus user?

Re: scan for author and take action

[Magnus Henoch]

reader@newsguy.com writes:

> I want to scan a group for certain author and take action on messages
> found. 

Does '/ a' (gnus-summary-limit-to-author) do what you want?

Magnus

Re: scan for author and take action

[reader]

Magnus Henoch <mange@freemail.hu> writes:

> reader@newsguy.com writes:
>
>> I want to scan a group for certain author and take action on messages
>> found. 
>
> Does '/ a' (gnus-summary-limit-to-author) do what you want?

Only if it can be done as the agent downloads messages or in some way
be automated.

Re: scan for author and take action

[Dave Goldberg]

Could you please clarify what you're trying to do?  Do you want to run something after you've entered the group without having to manually step through the process?  If so, then / a followed by M-P-b (gnus-uu-mark-buffer) and then M-& and your command could be put into a macro or otherwise turned into an interactive function.

If, on the other hand, you're trying to do this on group entry, then I don't know the best way to do it, but one thing that will work is to create your own sort function that runs your author-specific function as a side effect of sorting.  I have done something like this for an imap group into which I sieve all messages directed at my group's trouble ticket system.  Sometimes people cc me directly as well as sending to the system address so I end up with a "duplicate" message that doesn't have the proper subject tag so I want to ensure I don't end up replying on that one or I'll generate a new ticket number (at best) or lose the thread (at worst).  So I wrote a sort function that parses the ticket tag and sorts by the ticket number, and also scores down any message not tagged by the system
 .

So in the group parameters for that group I have (from memory as I'm not at work and don't have access right now so may not be syntactically correct):

(gnus-article-sort-functions 'dsg-sort-by-ticket-number)

And in .gnus, I copied gnus-article-sort-by-subject to dsg-sort-by-ticket-number and modified it to my needs.

-- 
Dave Goldberg
david.goldberg6@verizon.net

Re: scan for author and take action

[reader]

Dave Goldberg <david.goldberg6@verizon.net> writes:

> Could you please clarify what you're trying to do?

[...]

What I'd really like is to have this action performed when the agent
downloads the messages similar to what mail splitting does.  But in
the case of NNTP after filtering for the proper messages it would have
to split a copy off to somewhere.  Probably and nnml group.

So to clarify, I want to take actions as the downloads happen.
If that cannot be done then next best would be on group entry so some
thing like your code in Group Params I guess.

I seem to recal some method to expire messages to some archive.  If
filtering could be hitched to that in NNTP groups that would maybe be
the best solution.